I love a lot of local multiplayer games, but I'm rarely in the same room as the friends I want to play them with. Steam's new Remote Play Together feature, which is available in the beta client, looks to solve that enduring problem by jury-rigging online multiplayer into games which don't support it. And it works, somewhat amazingly.

Only the host needs to own the game, and after they launch it, they can invite friends through the Steam friends list (just right click a friend's name and select 'Remote Play Together'). Once a remote player joins, the game is streamed to them in a fullscreen window. The difference between Remote Play Together and a regular broadcast is, of course, that it also gives viewers mouse and keyboard control, or recognizes their controller as one connected to the host's PC. 

It's remote access to a PC, which is nothing new, but limited to the game window. I tried to see if input could leak into the desktop environment by sharing a windowed game, but the best I could do is get a remote player to move my cursor out of the window. You can't troll your friends by pressing Alt-F4 remotely to close the game or anything like that—it'll just close your own window.

You also can't fancy yourself a small-time Google Stadia competitor by inviting friends to play singleplayer games on your PC. I tried using the feature with Slay the Spire and Disco Elysium, but the Remote Play option wasn't available. Right now, 4,254 games are supported, and you can find the list of them here.

Above: Rayman Origins on my screen, with Wes hosting.

The test results

Our testing confirmed the obvious: the quality of your experience will vary with the quality of the host's internet connection.

We started with so-so conditions. I hosted TowerFall Ascension for Wes on a notoriously inconsistent Comcast connection with 8-to-10 Mbps upload speed. I ran it on an ultrawide, 2560×1080 monitor, which meant the black bars at the sides of my screen were being streamed to his 1440p, 16:9 display. Wes said it looked like garbage.

We then switched places, with Wes hosting on his 100 Mbps fiber connection, running the game at 1440p. It looked great on my end, and I was surprised to find that I didn't feel like I was at a disadvantage as we fired arrows at one another. Of course there had to be some latency, but I couldn't sense it.

In both TowerFall Ascension and Spelunky, my Xbox One controller was detected instantly. When Wes tried to host a game of Rayman Origins, however, I had to use the keyboard. I might've been able to get it to detect my controller by fiddling with Steam Big Picture settings, but I sense that some games are just going to be stubborn.

In those first two games, though, everything worked perfectly. All I had to do was accept Wes' invite, and a few seconds later I was looking at the game, able to interact with the menu as player two. In TowerFall especially, once we were past character selection, it genuinely felt like I was playing a built-in online multiplayer mode.

Above: TowerFall Ascension on my screen, with Wes hosting.

Later, I tested Enter the Gungeon and TowerFall Ascension with a friend who lives in the Midwest. I'm in California. We had trouble getting it to work initially, but both games were playable despite our distance. (Note that the host's stream passes through a Steam server before making its way to the other players, so the location of that server adds a variable.)

With him hosting Enter the Gungeon, I noticed a bit of input lag, but was able to adapt. The real problem was how artifacted it looked at times. In a fast, busy game like that, you need to see the enemies crisply and I couldn't. Now and then it would hitch for a good second. It was technically playable, but I'd never want to play that game at that quality.

This time when I hosted TowerFall, however, he said it looked fine on his end, and though he noticed some input delay, we went toe-to-toe for a match. Network conditions are fickle. The only advice I can give is to have the person with the fastest internet connection host the game you're trying to play, and to ask the stars for advice as to when their upload speed will be at its peak.

Above: Enter the Gungeon with non-ideal network conditions.

Image quality and latency won't be a big deal for all games. Part of the reason I picked TowerFall for testing is that it requires precise timing, but turn-based games will obviously be ideal for the feature. It's too bad hot seat local multiplayer has gone out of fashion over the past couple decades.

Acknowledging that Remote Play won't always work perfectly, as nothing reliant on network conditions can, I'm excited by the opportunity to crack open games I haven't played in ages with people who I've moved away from in the process of relocating a couple of times.

It's also heartening to see Steam iterating on these experimental features. The past couple years of Valve history haven't been the most exciting. It's announced some VR games, but we haven't seen them. The world bounced off Artifact so hard there's a new crater somewhere in Washington. Until the recent library redesign, the news about Steam has typically involved equivocating statements about what it will and won't sell (the line seems to be drawn at 'whatever people get really mad about').

But this new feature is playful and generous. Depending on how well it works in the long run, it could improve sales of local multiplayer games by broadening their audience. For those who already have a collection of local multiplayer games, it's a way to get more out of the games they own. Everybody wins, as far as I can tell.

Steam is already the best game launcher, but the past few months have reinforced the idea that Valve isn't resting on its success. I haven't tried streaming services like Parsec to see how they stack up to Remote Play Together, but it's certainly the most convenient way to solve the problem of never being in the same room as the people you play games with.

Back in June, Ubisoft announced that it would give away a free game every month for the rest of the year as part of its celebration of 30 years in the business. First up was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and then in July we got the stealth classic Splinter Cell. For August, Ubi is taking things in a slightly different direction.

We could not celebrate Ubisoft 30th anniversary without talking about Rayman. Created in 1995 by Michel Ancel, Rayman is one of the few platforming characters that has been created at the 32-bit era that is still alive today, Ubisoft wrote in the blurb accompanying the freebie. Rayman 1 was released on Atari Jaguar and is today the Ubisoft game that has traveled across the most different platforms.

The writeup also includes an interesting bit of trivia: Rayman was designed without arms and legs for the simple reason that arms and legs are really hard to animate. Being limbless gives Rayman more speed and dynamism, and it also enables many of his abilities, like the throwing fist and the car shoe.

Rayman Origins, the actual free game in question, is a back to the root 2D platformer that was originally released in 2011. And it's really good, too: A beautifully animated, brilliantly scored, exquisitely judged platformer, as we said in our review. You can't get much better than that.

Rayman Origins isn't actually free yet: Despite being the game-of-the-month for July, Splinter Cell reamins on the table for now. The Ubi 30 giveaway page says Rayman Origins will take its place in mid-August.

Update: There actually is a firm freebie date, not on the Ubi 30 page but on Twitter: Rayman Origins will go free on August 17.

In Face Off, PC Gamer writers go head to head over an issue affecting PC gaming. Today, Tom and Wes argue about boss fights, which have been around nearly as long as video games themselves, and whether they re an outdated concept.

Wes: YES. I ve played many great boss fights in my day, but far too many big games shoehorn in boss fights when they don t need them. Boss fights once made perfect video game sense in linear, side-scrolling levels. Get to the end of the stage, fight the big bad in charge, and move on to the next. And that s still fun! But as games have evolved with open worlds and non-linear levels and forms of gameplay more nuanced than shoot slash punch bad guy, boss fights don t fit as well. Bioshock and the more recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution are two modern examples of boss fights gone really wrong. Bioshock needed an emotional climax, not one that involved shooting a roided-up bad guy. And Human Revolution betrayed the core of its gameplay by making you shoot it out with its bosses, which is something the new Deus Ex is thankfully addressing. Boss fights can still be done well, of course, but they re most definitely antiquated.

Tom M.: NO. Boss fights aren t always fun, but used correctly they can be vital to the pacing of a game. Boss fights don t just represent the end of a level, they are a change of pace after a long stretch of similar gameplay. You ve been running around shooting and beating up bad guys for a while, but how are you going to deal with this new enemy? That s when the concept of a boss fight really shines; when it s not just a bigger harder enemy, but instead challenges you in some interesting and different way. I completely agree that AAA games have recently misused the boss fight trope, treating it more like an expected practice than a place to shake up the game s design, but that doesn t mean boss fights as a whole are an outdated concept.

Wes: Sure—I d look like a big dumb idiot if I said all boss fights today are lame and crappy. There are still good ones! But I think there are two big problems with how boss fights are implemented. In big-budget games, they re often used to facilitate some dramatic cutscene or story moment, which means taking control away from the player or forcing you to play in a specific way. That sucks. And in general, I think too many games use boss fights because they re expected. Boss fights are part of the language of video games, but they re a very old word. And I d like to see more games creating new words instead of falling back on the Middle English that is the boss fight.

Tom: I actually don t mind boss fights being more rigid or scripted than the rest of a game. Making open world experiences where the player has lots of choice is a very difficult thing to do, and too much freedom can sometimes make for a crummy story. Boss fights are the perfect moment for a developer to bring the story back under their control a little bit to let them reliably tell the story they want to. Of course, the boss fight shouldn t take certain options or playstyles away from the player that the rest of a game has made them accustomed to, like in Deus Ex for example. Those fights should be climactic and should represent a shift in the story. Even if they re expected, they can play a vital role in the rhythm of a game.

Wes: Ah, so idealistic! Time and again, boss fights in big-budget games do change up the play style you ve been taught just to show you something cool. Even the Batman games, which have fantastic combat, lose their lustre when they put you in an arena to slug it out with a boss. Think of the end of Asylum, when the Joker gets all beefy and slugs it out with Batman. It s a great game, but that s a cookie cutter boss fight that relies on antiquated video game language. How do we make a big, climactic battle? Hm, how about lots of punching? But the Joker would never do that! He d do something clever. A smart, modern take on the boss fight there wouldn t end with a punching match. I d like to see more games have confidence in what they do best. To use a pretty traditional 2D game as an example: I don t even remember the final boss of Rayman Origins, but I do remember the incredibly challenging and rewarding final platforming sequence leads up to it. Surviving that level is the true boss of the game.

Tom: Lots of games have also tried doing boss sequences or boss levels instead of a straight up fight, and I love that. I think it s great when games don t adhere to the formula, but that s not the solution for every game. Assassin s Creed doesn t really have many boss fights, instead a particularly special baddy will get a mission all to himself. That s cool and different and doesn t shoehorn a stupid arena fight into an assassination game, but I also don t remember a single one of those missions. You know what I do remember? Every single boss I fought in Dark Souls 2. I still agree that developers will put cookie cutter boss fights unnecessarily into games that don t need them, but it s by no means a concept that s lost it s value. It s just more valuable in certain types of games.

Wes: I may not remember the characters of many Assassin s Creed targets, but I do remember some of my more epic assassinations—and I loved that those characters could be killed silently and instantly, if you planned the perfect stealth kill. That s a smart modern twist on the classic boss fight, too me--it elevates what s best about Assassin s Creed, instead of suddenly changing how you play the game. And hell, I love Dark Souls bosses too—I don t hate the traditional boss fight, I just think many games today could do something more interesting with them. It seems like we re mostly on the same page. So...what games are really doing creative boss fights right these days?

Tom: The first example that jumps to my mind is Titan Souls, a game made up of nothing but boss fights. It takes the kill the big monster in an arena concept to its extreme and cuts the fat off everywhere else. If you need to be convinced that compelling and exciting boss fights are still possible in modern games, Titan Souls will do that and then some. Terraria is another good example; each boss is difficult and unique, but also represents a tier of progression. The game has an open world with no fake constraints, but you can mostly only reach bosses in a certain order, each one giving you the means to fight the next. These games embrace the boss fight as the effective tool it is; a change of pace, a milestone in your progression, and a generator of wow moments.

Wes: I ve played my fair share of Terraria, but I ll be checking up on Titan Souls. If killing each boss doesn t make me feel a deep and intense sorrow in true Shadow of the Colossus fashion, though, I m going to hold you responsible for my irrational expectations.

Tom: Titan Souls was the first game that made me physically jump out of my chair when I killed a boss, and I did so for every single one. Consider your expectations rationally high.